Sir John Monash

“ On such a road as that leading east from Amiens towards the battle front, the congestion was always extreme. Ammunition lorries, regimental horsed transport, motor dispatch riders, marching infantry, long strings of horses and mules going to and from water, traction engines, convoy after convoy of motor buses, supply wagons, mess carts, signal motor tenders, complete batteries of Artillery, motor tractors, tanks, Staff motor cars and gangs of coolie labourers surged steadily forward, in an amazing jumble, with never a moment's pause. ”

“ Division, which, in spite of its great successes in Belgium and Flanders, had never been able to boast, like its sister Divisions, that it had been "down on the Somme"—come into its own at last, and called upon to prove its mettle. And then there was the thought that they were going to measure themselves, man to man, against an enemy who, skulking behind his field works, had for so long pounded them to pieces in their trenches, poisoned them with gas, and bombed them as they slept in their billets. ”

“ Carrying parties shoulder their burdens, and adjust the straps; pioneers grasp their picks and shovels; engineers take up their stores of explosives and primers and fuses; machine and Lewis gunners whisper for the last time to the carriers of their magazines and belt boxes to be sure and follow up. The Stokes Mortar carrier slings his heavy load, and his loading numbers fumble to see that their haversacks of cartridges are handy. Overhead drone the aeroplanes, and from the rear, in swelling chorus, the buzzing and clamour of the Tanks grows every moment louder and louder. ”

“ By that high standard they judge you, and admire you that you have reached it. We have all been fighting the same battle of freedom in these old battlegrounds. You have all heard the names of them in history. But it is a great wonder, too, in history that you should be here fighting on the old battlefields, which you never thought, perhaps, to see. The work of our fathers, which we wanted to hand down unharmed to our children, the Germans tried to take from us. They tried to rob us of all that is dearest in modern human society. ”

“ But I had formed the theory that the true rôle of the Infantry was not to expend itself upon heroic physical effort, nor to wither away under merciless machine-gun fire, nor to impale itself on hostile bayonets, nor to tear itself to pieces in hostile entanglements— (I am thinking of Pozières and Stormy Trench and Bullecourt, and other bloody fields) —but, on the contrary, to advance under the maximum possible protection of the maximum possible array of mechanical resources, in the form of guns, machine guns, tanks, mortars and aeroplanes; to advance with as little impediment as possible ”

“ Popular interest naturally centres upon the Infantry, not only because they are the most numerous, but also because they are invariably in the forefront of the battle and often in immediate contact with the enemy. Without the slightest disparagement to the important rôle of the Infantryman and to the valour which its performance demands, it must never be forgotten that the work of the Artillery, Engineers, Pioneers, Machine Gunners, Trench Mortars, Air Service and Tanks is in every way equally important and essential to the success of any battle operation. ”

“ It is my earnest hope, and also my sincere conviction, that the fine spirit and the high efficiency of the Division will be maintained under the leadership of my successor, Brigadier-General Gellibrand; and if the men of the Division feel, as I trust they do, an obligation to perpetuate for my sake the traditions built up by them during the period of my command, they can do so in no better way than by rendering to him a service as thorough and a support as loyal as I have been privileged to enjoy at their hands. ”

“ They knew that an offensive policy was the cheapest policy, and the proof that they accepted it as the right one was their ever-rising moral as the campaign developed.
"Feed your troops on victory," is a maxim which does not appear in any text-book, but it is nevertheless true. The aim and end of all the efforts and of all the heavy sacrifices of the Australian nation was victory in the field. Nothing that could be done could lead more swiftly and more directly to its fulfilment than an energetic offensive policy. ”

“ A perfected modern battle plan is like nothing so much as a score for an orchestral composition, where the various arms and units are the instruments, and the tasks they perform are their respective musical phrases. Every individual unit must make its entry precisely at the proper moment, and play its phrase in the general harmony. The whole programme is controlled by an exact time-table, to which every infantryman, every heavy or light gun, every mortar and machine gun, every tank and aeroplane must respond with punctuality ”

“ It is an accepted principle of tactics that in any given battle the advantage always rests heavily on the side of the defence. Where numbers, resources and moral are equal, no attack can hope to succeed.
If, in the teachings before the war, it was correct to say that a Commander should hesitate to attack unless he had a preponderance of men and guns of at least two to one, such a dictum assuredly did not take into account field defences of the permanent and elaborate character of the Hindenburg Line. ”

“ Lord Rawlinson has more than once referred to the operation as the finest single feat of the war. Inevitably the dramatic and unlooked for success of the Second Division in the rapid storming of the Mount enthrals the imagination and overshadows all the other noteworthy incidents of these pregnant days. But none will begrudge the rain of congratulations which fell upon the head of Major-General Rosenthal. A massive man, whose build belies his extraordinary physical energy, he always was an egregious optimist, incapable of recognizing the possibility of failure. ”

“ Those who are privileged to lead in battle such splendid men are animated with a pride and admiration which is tempered only by concern at their waning numbers. Already some battalions which have made historic traditions have ceased to exist as fighting units, and others must follow unless the Australian nation stands by us and sees to it that our ranks are kept filled. We refuse to believe that the men and women of Australia will suffer their famous Divisions to decay, or that the young manhood still remaining in our homeland will not wish to share in the renown of their brothers in France. ”

“ But, so far, I have written of the Infantry plan only; and much remains to be told of the simultaneous action designed to be taken by all the other arms, which rendered possible and emphasized the success of the Infantry. No one can rival me [96] in my admiration for the transcendant military virtues of the Australian Infantryman, for his bravery, his battle discipline, his absolute reliability, his individual resource, his initiative and endurance. ”

“ Such was the formidable array of fighting resources under the direct orders of the Australian Corps Commander, and, together with the five Australian Divisions, formed a fighting organization of great strength and solidarity. It became an instrument for offensive warfare, as has been said by a high authority, which for size and power excelled all Corps organizations which either this or any previous war had produced. It was an instrument which it was a great responsibility, as also a great honour, to wield in the task of shattering the still formidable military power of the enemy. ”

“ A volunteer army—the only purely volunteer army that fought in the Great War—it was composed of men carefully selected according to a high physical standard, from which, happily, no departure was made, even although recruiting began to fall off in the last year of the war, and there were some who had proposed a more lenient recruiting examination. The cost to Australia of delivering each fighting man, fully trained, to the battle front was too great to permit of any doubt whether the physical quality of the raw material would survive the wear and tear of war. ”

“ I entertain no sort of doubt that every Australian soldier will worthily rise to so great an occasion, and that every man, imbued with the spirit of victory, will, in spite of every difficulty that may confront him, be animated by no other resolve than grim determination to see through to a clean finish, whatever his task may be. ”

“ The time has arrived when it is proper to take stock of gains and losses, and to endeavour to appraise, at its true value, the work done by the Australian Army Corps during its long-sustained effort of the last six months of its fighting career.
It has become customary to regard the actual captures of prisoners and guns as a true index of the degree of success which has attended any series of battle operations. Every soldier knows, however, that such a standard of judgment, applied alone, would render but scant justice. ”

“ I allude to the moving battle, or as it is called in text-book language, "open warfare;" a type of fighting in which few of the British Forces formed since the original Expeditionary Force had any experience except on the manœuvre ground under peace conditions—a disability which applied equally to the Australian troops. Confident, however, in their adaptability and in their power of initiative under novel conditions, I did not hesitate to prescribe, for this second phase of the battle, the adoption of the principles and methods of open warfare. ”

“ The moral results both on the enemy and on ourselves were far more important, and deserve far more emphasis than do the material gains.
It was, as I have said, the first offensive operation, on any substantial scale, that had been fought by any of the Allies since the previous autumn. Its effect was electric, and it stimulated many men to the realization that the enemy was, after all, not invulnerable, in spite of the formidable increase in his resources which he had brought from Russia. It marked the termination, once and for all, of the purely defensive attitude of the British front. ”

“ On the part of the troops it was a remarkable feat of physical and mental endurance to face again and yet again the stress of battle. To the infantry a certain measure of periodical rest was accorded, but the Artillery and technical services had scarcely any respite at all. Almost every day of the whole period they worked and fought, night and day, under the fire of the enemy's batteries, and under his drenching, suffocating gas attacks, for our battery positions were the favourite targets for his gas bombardments. ”

“ The Australian is accustomed to team-work. He learns it in the sporting field, in his industrial organizations, and in his political activities. The team-work which he developed in the war was of the highest order of efficiency. Each man understood his part and understood also that the part which others had to play depended upon the proper performance of his own.
The gunner knew that the success of the infantry depended upon his own punctilious performance of his task, its accuracy, its punctuality, its conscientious thoroughness. ”

“ Just as it was the special rôle of the Tanks to deal with the enemy machine guns, so it was the special rôle of our Counter-battery Artillery to deal with the enemy's field and heavy guns and howitzers. These—the guns and the machine guns—were the only things that troubled us; because, for the German soldier individually, our Australian infantryman is and always has been more than a match. ”

“ In spite of stress and difficulty, unremitting toil and wasted effort, weary days and sleepless nights, fresh task piling upon the task but just begun, labouring even harder during periods of so-called rest than when their troops were actually in the line, this gallant band of leaders remained steadfast of purpose, never faltered, never lost their faith in final victory, never failed to impress their optimism and their unflinching fighting spirit upon the men whom they commanded. ”

“ Quentin constitutes no striking feature in the landscape. But standing upon the hill itself one speedily realizes how fully its possession dominates the whole of the approaches to it. So placed that both stretches of the river can from it be commanded by fire, and giving full and uninterrupted observation over all the country to the west and north and south of it, the hill is ringed around with line upon line of wire entanglements, and its forward slopes are glacis-like and bare of almost any cover. ”

“ Of strong though not heavy build and of energetic demeanour, Glasgow succeeded not so much by exceptional mental gifts, or by tactical skill of any very high order, as by his personal driving force and determination, which impressed themselves upon all his subordinates. He always got where he wanted to get—was consistently loyal to the Australian ideal, and intensely proud of the Australian soldier. ”

“ But, having completed our task in the main object which brought us from our distant homeland, and having thereby safeguarded the future of our Nation by the conquest of our most formidable enemy, we are now faced with another and an equally important task, namely, to prepare ourselves to resume our duties of citizenship and to assist individually and collectively in the reconstruction of the Australian Nation. Our numbers and our prestige place this opportunity in our hands, and impose upon us this great responsibility. ”

“ The conference was therefore a lengthy one, for many problems of tactical mechanism, which had been settled in connection with the preceding battles of Hamel and August 8th, had to be reopened and elucidated.
These regular battle conferences were in the Australian Corps an innovation from the time the command of it devolved upon me. They proved a powerful instrument for the moulding of a uniformity of tactical thought and method throughout the command. They brought together men who met face to face but seldom, and they permitted of an exhaustive and educative interchange of views. ”

“ The time was nevertheless ripe for action on a scale far more decisive than had become orthodox in the British Army in the past. Efforts on that method had been confined to a thrust, limited in point both of distance and of time, and followed by a period of inaction; they had often given the enemy ample leisure to recover, and to reorganize his order of battle.
To maintain an offensive, day after day, indefinitely, would require sufficient resources, particularly in infantry, to allow Divisions to be used alternatingly. ”

“ Since the opening of the German offensive in March every Division of the Australian Army in France has been engaged and always with decisive success. The men of Australia, wherever and whenever they have entered this mighty conflict, have invariably brought the enemy to a standstill, and have made him pay dearly for each futile attempt to pass them on the roads to Amiens and to the Channel Ports. Their reputation as skilful, disciplined and gallant soldiers has never stood higher throughout the Empire than it does to-day. ”